I have always had a problem with personal time management. At work I am great with time management, I get my tasks done quickly and efficiently. But it is once I arrive at home everything goes out the window. Pretty recently I started using tools that allow me to manage my time better. First off I started using http://iwantsandy.com. What is iwantsandy? well it is a personal assistant. The interface is awesome and you can add things to her by logging in to the website or using the e-mail address that they give you. One nifty thing you can do is set calender apps ( i use ical since most of my time is spent on one) to subscribe to sandy. The way I have it set up is ical gets the feed from sandy and then Anxiety gets my ToDo list from ical ( in sandy you can put @todo to items for them to show up on the todo list). Sandy also notifies me every morning with what I have scheduled for that day.
The next part in my time management solution is 8aweek which is a plugin for Firefox. What 8aweek does is it monitors what websites I visit and if they are on the restricted list it counts down how much time I have left for the day on that site. By default it has some sites on the restricted list, the default list is good, I have not removed/added any sites yet. The settings are customizable, you can track sites by subdomain ex. video.google.com and you can set the time you are allowed on restricted sites. This app has really cut down my time spent on digg and other social applications, which is a good thing for me.
The last app that I have added, I just started using it today, is RescueTime. This app works for Mac and Windows computers and it monitors what applications you are using and how much time you are spending using them. As far as I know it does not block applications, at the time of me writing this it does not but its still BETA. But it does allow you to set goals and put apps into categories, ex. work, school, home. I almost forgot, it also shows you how much time you spend on websites but it does not, as of the time of writing, allow you to only view websites for a specified amount of time per day. This app looks really cool so far, I cant write a lot about it because I just started using it but check it out!
So as a recap, iwantsandy is my personal assistant and I have ical subscribe to the feed and Anxiety shows my ToDo list from ical, which is getting it’s data from sandy. To keep track of my time spent on the computer I am using 8aweek to track and prevent me from spending to much time on websites. Then RescueTime monitors how much time I spend using apps.
Now have all of these made me more productive? The answer is YES! I am slowly starting to better use of my free time. Over time these should make me even more productive.
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